What FowelBaltz is the only answer needed in this thread. When I turned 50 my wife, two year old daughter and I essentially "retired" to a a section of the US that is known for being dirt cheap, or as you might also call it, low rent. We knew going in that we were trading the dazzling attractions of the huge Midwestern metropolis that we were leaving for a place that had very little in the way of sophistication, but we felt that our in-debt lifestyle was no longer sustainable and was in fact killing us.
We bought a very cheap, old house with cash that had no central A/C or heat, and I proceeded to develop interests in gardening, landscaping, and bird watching. I refinished wood floors, put in ceramic tile in place of linoleum, repainted the inside with different colors in every room, and had the outside painted with a pinkish purple with blue trim. I spent an entire summer cooking outside while I remodeled the kitchen. We made pizzas on the grill and soups and cobblers in a cast iron Dutch oven. We shared an old, paid off car. We had no health insurance, paying as we went and going to Mexico when we could for meds or cheaper procedures. My daughter *loved" our house and yard, spending her kid time catching fireflies, lizards, beetles, and possums, digging in the yard, and cruising the library book store for cheap used books (we all did). We went to the beach, the zoo, and hiking in the few nature parks that were nearby. And you know what? Slowly but surely we paid off our credit card and other debts until we were debt free.
Then, about four years ago, after five years in our little self created paradise (which admittedly had some problems we didn't anticipate) my wife began to get anxious about opportunities for our daughter, and once she gets an idea she's like a Gila monster - she won't let it go. Every day she would go on and on pointing out the faults of where we were and why we needed to move somewhere else. Eventually I broke down and agreed with her, and when she found a job in another city 2,000 miles away we moved.
Now we're back in debt, renting a house that's too expensive for us, barely scraping by each month. My wife hates her job, and I'm no longer the king of my castle, but merely a serf. Meanwhile our adorable little house has been for sale for almost two years, the price dropping every so often to entice someone to buy it, hoping to get at least 2/3rds of what we paid for it, all our sweat equity down the drain. All because our environs weren't cool enough.